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Islamic Terrorism Is Over | Notes From The Golden Age 18

It’s not really the focus of today’s video, which I wanted to keep light, but it really is fucking outrageous what the Defense Department is trying to pull off with its new National Defense Strategy. The Pentagon continues to use terrorism as a blank check for assassinations, kidnappings, and hyper-militarization in dozens of countries all over the world. The Pentagon has used it to scare the US public for decades now. They want to keep doing all of these things. But now that terrorism is fading, they want to perform a magic trick, keep all their money and toys, and continue with business as usual.

And they’re getting away with it. Washington, DC is super absorbed with talking about how much it hates Donald Trump, but is acting with surprising unity. Trump has started a trade war with China. The Department of Justice is pursuing cases against Chinese businesses with unprecedented and shocking vigor. The recently vacating “adults in the room” at the Defense Department were obsessed with China too. Every media group lightly poo poos Trump’s treatment of China… and then jumps on the bandwagon to talk about how scary and sinister China is. It’s outrageous really. Sigh.

Well at least we’re attempting to hold them accountable. Spill your glass for the War on Terror. It was a terribly wasteful and pointless way to spend a couple trillion dollars and a couple million lives.

Hey there. Almost three years ago now I predicted that due to falling oil prices, Islamic Terrorism would quickly start to fade away. And that’s exactly what happened.

It was always Saudi Arabia and the other gulf states that funded all this death and destruction.. Now that they have less spare money, everybody gets less terrorism.

Now This is a hard point to back up. Every government and media organization in the world profits from fear, and they dont want you to know that one of the main justifications for their budgets is disappearing. So nobody is really covering this and I am just one guy, i can’t put together a database on this. About a year and a half back though I solved this problem, hilariously by using one of the most bigoted anti Islamic news sources imaginable.

…the Religion of Peace.com. This website claims to provide a comprehensive list of terror attacks across the world. It’s pretty nuts.

The vast majority of the incidents come from active war zones like Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. The website claims that it is dedicated to the idea that Islam presents an ideological threat to human dignity and freedom. The list of atrocities is supposed to be a big part of that project. But Including all these deaths in Iraq and Syria, that have as much to do with George W. Bush as they do with Islam isn’t particularly fair. The religion of peace website is being dishonest to prove a point.

It is weirdly useful though. A year and a half ago I claimed that the fall in the oil price would result in a fall in Jihadi terror worldwide. Gulf Money fuels both the attacks in the West we talk about, and the attacks in the Non-Western war zones that we don’t talk about. Interestingly, and for the worst reasons, the religion of peace website has provided a great metric to judge my prediction by. So let’s see how I’m doing according to the most islamophobic data set imaginable.

Yes indeed let’s take a look. 2018 is just finished so we can count it all up…

In 2014, the year that oil prices peaked, the religion of peace put deaths from Islamic terrorism at 32,844. in 2015 27,595 people were killed, in 2016 we have 21,413. in 2017 the final numbers were 16,386 and in 2018 deaths fell by almost a third, down to 11,773.

So, so far so good, according to the most anti muslim statistics available, we have a clear picture of the steady fall of Islamic terrorism. But what’s really interesting is what you find if you dive in to the religion of peace.com numbers a little more. I dumped them into excel and played with them so you don’t have to. These new low 2018 figures are actually absurdly inflated.

First off over 1100 of the deaths listed in 2018 didn’t happen in 2018. They are mass graves from the heyday of the Islamic State that were discovered in 2018 but date back to earlier days of higher oil prices and more gulf funding for terrorism. I know I shouldn’t be holding our bigoted data set to such a high standard, but using 2014 or 2015 deaths to determine how scary the world was in 2018 just strikes me as fraudulent. And then there are the deaths from Nigeria that get into shaker territory.

Some deaths from Nigeria in 2018 are the result of Boko Haram. Those guys are the classic example of a gulf funded, Saudi educated African terrorist group. But their impact on Nigeria in 2018 has been far superseded by a different conflict. As of July The International Crisis Group pointed out that 6 times More people have been killed in an entirely separate conflict between largely Muslim herdsmen and largely Christian farmers.

This conflict between the Fulani herdsmen and other Nigerian ethnicities flared up in 2018 but it has literally been going on for centuries. It was a large factor back when the British controlled the country and when less than 2% of Northern Nigerians were even capable of reading the Koran. This sort of conflict doesn’t really strike me as terrorism. For me these conflicts are more about land than religion. Conflict over land and how to use it is a universal in Human history, from Massacres carried out by Mongols and US pioneers, to very non Muslim farm occupiers in Zimbabwe and South Africa, to US radical Cliven Bundy and his occupation of Federal land.

The conflict between herdsman and farmer is as old as farming, and I don’t think it makes sense to include these deaths in our total. So when you take out the non- Boko Haram deaths from Nigeria you get down to 9425 deaths from Islamic terrorism. Worldwide. So like an eighth of 2017 overdose deaths in the United States alone. I can see why the religion of peace wants to see a higher number. They need to.

This kind of drift is becoming more and more essential to the Islam hater. The general public cares about their chances of getting killed in an act of Islamic terrorism. As that chance diminishes those who profit from fear need to dig deeper, and expand the definition of terrorism wider and wider.

Even though Europe saw dramatically fewer acts of terror than recent years, the BBC made sure that all of its worldwide readers were aware of that slimeball who killed four folks at a French Christmas market, and the mentally unstable man who non fatally stabbed three people at a Manchester train station. More blatantly islamophobic websites like Jihad Watch, are finding themselves focusing more on cultural issues and petty crime as the steady stream of ISIS outrages dries up completely.

Things are going to get more desperate for the merchants of hate. Their biggest supporter has given up and moved on. For much of the past few decades the US department of defense and it’s enablers have been focused on Islamic Terrorism. There was plenty of metastasized military industrial complex money and personnel sloshing around anti Islam organizations like the Gatestone Institute and Jihad Watch. That came to a symbolic end in January of 2018.

That month saw the release of the new National Defense Strategy. To quote directly…

Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.

After using it to justify outrageous budgets for 17 years, even the Pentagon now acknowledges that terrorism is fading away. That’s why everybody in Washington DC has been working so hard this year to get us scared of China again.

Now don’t get me wrong, there will be more acts of terrorism that use radical Islam as an excuse. Some of them may even be terribly damaging. But as a large phenomenon, radical Islamic terrorism is already fading away into history. That’s pretty cool.

Thanks for watching, please subscribe, and if you want to know more about Islamic terrorism and the US Saudi relationship that created almost all of it, you should check out my short book Everybody’s Lying about Islam, available now on the Amazon Kindle and in paperback form.

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My analysis of the Religion of Peace Terrorism Database (Killed), Oil Price (WTI), US Dollar Value, and OPEC Supply and Production data finds evidence that oil price does move with terrorism (deaths), but might be more complicated.

Two variables are the strongest predictors of terrorism deaths: (1) year-to-year change in the gap between OPEC Supply and Production (Negative Relationship to Terrorism Deaths), and (2) the year-to-year change in the value of the U.S. dollar (Positive Relationship to Terrorism Deaths).

Both of those variables are predictors of oil price.

So might the dynamic go like this (I’m just thinking out loud, so be gentle):

When Saudis see a rising dollar (which is the currency used for oil transactions), they are more inclined to sell of excess supply and send some of those proceeds to Islamists terror groups.

Does that seem plausible?

This two-variable model predicts 50 percent of the variance in terrorism deaths (admittedly, I only have 12 annual data points).

I have not yet tested the relationship at a monthly-level…which is probably too fine of detail for this theory (Higher Oil Prices ==> More Terrorism). I don’t think the Saudis/UAE are making ISIS funding decisions based on monthly changes to oil prices or production/supply totals. But it would allow us to also test an alternative hypothesis: Terrorism ==> Higher Oil Prices.

Wow! You’ve gone into a lot of detail here. My hunch is that month to month variations may be a bit too tight a frame to look at. It’s more a general trend… How are the Saudis or the Qataris feeling that year? Do they feel flush? Do they feel like they have spare cash?

This is key for the “What if oil spikes back up to 100?!?!” question I keep getting. If that spike, which is possible, is not sustained for a period of at least half a year or so, the urge to spend discretionary funds on Jihadism will probably not come back. There are a lot of fiscal holes opening up in Saudi Arabia that will take quite some time to fill before people feel like spending on complicated luxury goods like that.

Another key, key variable is that there has to be some kind of motivating conflict that Saudi Arabia, and sundry Western intelligence communities can get behind. Neither big wave of Jihadism, the slower one in the 1990s that culminated in 2001, and the wave that grew to 2014’s ISIS bonanza before crashing, would have been possible without the US supported war in Afghanistan or the US supported attempt to destroy Syria.

So while I tend to be amazed by the feats of quantitative analysis, I do wonder whether this particular theory is amenable. Sooo many very different sorts of variables.